Ready access to a telephone by persons confined to hospital beds is very important. When a person is a patient in a health care facility or bedridden at home, access to a telephone (perhaps his or her only means of communicating with others) becomes critical. Merely placing a telephone near the bed may be insufficient or at least inconvenient. To overcome these problems and make use of a telephone by a person in a bed more convenient, various attempts at mounting a telephone directly to a hospital bed have been attempted.
Most of the prior attempts have focused on using brackets which are connected to the hospital bed sideguard. A standard telephone or patient communicator is then placed within a receptacle on the bracket as shown in Hamm U.S. Pat. No. 4,431,154, or a wall-type phone is suspended from the bracket as shown in Rosten U.S. Pat. No. 4,602,755. Although other methods have been attempted, all require that the telephone be mounted to a device which is in turn mounted to the hospital bed sideguard. Thus, when the phone is removed from the sideguard, the mounting device must either remain on the bed or be stored. In addition, the brackets or other mounting devices are either difficult to attach or do not provide a sufficiently secure attachment. Finally, with the prior attempts it is often necessary to remove the mounting bracket or device prior to the lowering of the siderail.
Therefore, there has been a significant need for a telephone assembly that can be directly, easily and securely attached to a hospital bed sideguard. Further, there is a need for a means of attaching a telephone assembly to a hospital bed sideguard in such a manner that the sideguard may be lowered without the necessity of removing the telephone assembly therefrom.